Abstract：No matter how we conceive and make sense of liberty at the level of philosophical reflection,it is our intuition that liberty primarily implies making decisions and choices based on one's own understanding,and being free from others'interference or constraint in acting .The very idea of liberty is thus from the very beginning related to the notion of value :it is not that liberty is needed or required in whatever we are doing or will do,but that it is needed or required only in what matters most to us .It follows that liberty is at least instrumentally valuable . However,further analysis shows that liberty may also be intrinsically valuable to the extent that it helps to cultivate and promote the self-perfection of our nature as human beings .Therefore,so long as we are interested in having a certain goal as that on which we start and pursue our life as a human individual,and undertake to pursue or achieve such a goal through the rational agency of our own,liberty will become indispensable to us . Isaiah Berlin's thinking about liberty almost runs through the whole of his academic career . However,some tensions can be identified in his doctrine of liberty,typically in his seminal and yet highly debated paper″Two Concepts of Liberty″and other related works .Berlin initially held that liberty simply consists in doing whatever one wants to do without being interfered by other agents (including other individuals and social institutions) . However,very soon he came to realize that the understanding of liberty will give rise to an intuitively implausible result :the less one desires,the more freedom one has .To avoid this result,Berlin turned to claim that liberty lies in being capable of freeing from obstacles to one's possible choice or activity .This fact shows that even when Berlin construed liberty in a negative sense,he did not take liberty merely as the power to escape from actual obstacles to one's actual choice or action .In Berlin's view,what he called″negative liberty″is mainly concerned with answering the following question :in what kinds of domain is one permitted (or should one be permitted) to do what one is capable of doing or to become what one wants to be,without being interfered by others ?Given this,it is not difficult to see that if Berlin also included counterfactual choice or action in his conception of negative liberty,this kind of liberty would include not merely the power to escape from all of the actual or possible external obstacles,but also the ability to set goals,deliberate and make choices .It follows,as it seems,that Berlin's conception of negative liberty cannot be so negative as some commentators have thought or suggested . This point needs our attention because it will help us to see the distinction and connection between these two conceptions of liberty as construed by Berlin . According to Berlin,the conception of positive liberty is by and large aimed at answering a quite different question :what is it,or who is it that determines the control or interference that can decide one's doing this rather than doing that ?It can be easily seen from the manner in which Berlin defined positive liberty that the notion of positive liberty bears an essential connection to the idea of autonomy . However,in accordance with an intuitively acceptable understanding of the notion of autonomy,insofar as choice or action is concerned,autonomy largely depends on which part of the agent's self is to be identified as possessing the supreme authority over the agent . The concept of autonomy accordingly presupposes the idea that any actual human individual does not yet possess a perfectly unified psychological structure or personality . However,this idea,properly understood,does not necessarily have any implication for politics .Human nature is imbued with a series of dualistic oppositions,for instance,opposition between sensibility and understanding,or between desire and reason,or between social ideals and personal aspirations,and the like .The issue of autonomy will always exist and persist so long as no perfect harmony or integration has been achieved between our motivational system and our evaluational system .It follows that the aspiration to positive liberty would never cease if there had already been some intelligible connection between the idea of positive liberty and the idea of autonomy .On the basis of a detailed examination of this connection as well as the essential features of human nature,the paper shows that while Berlin had powerful reasons to give a normative priority to negative liberty in the political society and its construction,he did not have to deny that the idea of positive liberty can serve as an important or even indispensable ideal of personal life .
徐向东. 伯林的自由概念与人性[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2014, 44(5): 18-30.
Xu Xiangdong. Isaiah Berlin's Conception of Liberty and Human Nature
. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2014, 44(5): 18-30.
